Grant's Last Battle: The Story Behind the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant

Summary

The remarkable story of how one of America’s greatest military heroes became a literary legend.

The former general in chief of the Union armies during the Civil War . . . the two-term president of the United States . . . the beloved ambassador of American goodwill around the globe . . . the respected New York financier—Ulysses S. Grant—was dying. The hardscrabble man who regularly smoked twenty cigars a day had developed terminal throat cancer. Thus began Grant’s final battle—a race against his own failing health to complete his personal memoirs in an attempt to secure his family’s financial security. But the project evolved into something far more: an effort to secure the very meaning of the Civil War itself and how it would be remembered.

In this maelstrom of woe, Grant refused to surrender. Putting pen to paper, the hero of Appomattox embarked on his final campaign: an effort to write his memoirs before he died. The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant would cement his place as not only one of America’s greatest heroes but also as one of its most sublime literary voices.

Authors Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White have recounted Grant’s battlefield exploits as historians at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, and Mackowski, as an academic, has studied Grant’s literary career. Their familiarity with the former president as a general and as a writer bring Grant’s Last Battle to life with new insight, told with the engaging prose that has become the hallmark of the Emerging Civil War Series.

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Grant's Last Battle - Chris Mackowski

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First edition, first printing

ISBN-13: 978-1-61121-160-3

EPUB ISBN: 978-1-61121-161-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015943486

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For Terry Rensel,

my evil Twin

Author’s Note

As kids, my brother and I had a poster of the presidents on the closet door in our bedroom. My brother picked Lincoln as his favorite. I picked Ulysses S. Grant. I liked how grand the name sounded, and I knew he smoked cigars, which also seemed grand. That was about the extent of my knowledge, though.

My first real introduction to Grant came as it did for Robert E. Lee: in the Wilderness of central Virginia. There, I learned about the dust-covered man who had vowed that there would be no turning back. I have since spent a great deal of time on that battlefield, as well as the ones at Spotsylvania and North Anna, sharing stories of Grant’s time in the east. I have also visited the sites of his major battles out west. I have come to admire him a great deal.

I often liken Grant to another of my favorite characters from the war, Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. Both were men of deep resolve. I have seen how their resolve played out dramatically—and in dramatically different ways—on the battlefields around Fredericksburg, Virginia. Grant’s final 15 months likewise demonstrate his resolve, and in an especially striking way. That’s what has always drawn me to the story.

I’ve also been drawn to that story as a writer, particularly one who has studied and practiced memoir. Memoir is a particularly tricky form of nonfiction, not reliant on facts but on larger truth. Truth derives from facts but is not dependent on them, says historian Joan Waugh. It is based in the facts but ultimately not answerable to them. Today, professional historians call truth ‘Interpretation.’

At the Jackson Shrine, where Stonewall Jackson died, a clock sits on the fireplace mantel in Jackson’s death room (left), just as one sits on the fireplace mantel in Grant’s death room (right). The Jackson clock still ticks on, while the Grant clock was stopped at the time of death and never restarted. Occasionally, a visitor will come into the Shrine and see the clock and ask, Have you ever seen the one at Grant Cottage? (cm)(gc)

Grant was especially meticulous about his fact-checking, but what he writes and what he doesn’t, and what conclusions he draws from those facts, are all products of memoir, not of history writing. "By deciding to give his work the full title, Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, says historian Charles Bracelen Flood, he did himself a great favor. He could write about the things he wished to put before the reader, and omit those things he did not. At one stroke, he relieved himself of the obligation to include everything he might know about a battle or a person, while reserving the right to dwell on a smaller matter or fleeting perception."

I own a first edition of the Memoirs, but I have another connection to Grant’s story, as well. When Grant was general in chief of the army during Andrew Johnson’s administration, he and Julia lived in a Washington, D.C., townhouse at 205 I Street NW near the capitol (Sherman lived in #203). Julia Grant referred to it as this lovely house, this magnificent home. Upon the failure of Grant & Ward in 1884, the Grants sold all of their D.C. properties, and by 1965, the entire row of townhouses was demolished to make way for Interstate 395. The wooden doors from the Grants’ townhouse found their way, years later, to Stevenson Ridge in Spotsylvania, Virginia—my wife’s family’s property. Every day, I walk through a small piece of the collateral damage from Grant’s final battle.

The story of Grant’s last battle has been told by others, and I strongly encourage you to read their accounts. My take, in introducing you to these events, will be slightly more personal, keeping in the spirit of both history and memoir. By sharing it in such a way, I hope to help you connect with Grant’s story in the kind of personal way I have connected with it, too.

Grant’s doors stand twelve feet tall and now serve as the main entryway into Stevenson Ridge’s largest events space, the Lodge. (cm)

Notes About the Text

Material in quotation marks, including dialogue, represents direct quotations from primary sources. Dialogue that appears in italics rather than quotation marks is based on indirect quotes from primary sources.

Grant’s former aide, Horace Porter, said Grant spelled with heroic audacity, and ‘chanced it’ on the correctness. I have left Grant’s spelling intact, which at times looks like typos (and which has sometimes left me sleepless, such as when I left too as to, as Grant wrote it). I feel compelled to point out Grant’s heroic audacity with spelling in order to preserve the honor of my capable proofreaders and copyeditors.

Acknowledgments

My greatest debt for this book-about-a-book goes to my uncle, James Cawley, the man who taught me what a wonderful thing it is to love books. He had a marvelous personal library; when I was a kid, it had a scared air about it. On a trip to the beach when I was in early middle school, he bought me a copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune at a used book store (apparently the beach didn’t offer sand enough), and that did it for me. I have loved books, and loved reading them, ever since.

My aunt, Mary Beth Perring, has been the other great reader in my life. She and I have always shared a similar sensibility in books, which was great nourishment to me for years. I thank her and her husband, Bob—my Uncle Buck—for the photography they contributed to this book.

While writing a book about writing a book, I have thought often of the people who taught me how to write books. In particular, I thank Gail Cummings, Holly Dworken Cooley, the late Welch Everman, Kurtis Scaletta, Mark Van Tilburg, Kenny Fries, Paul Selig, Jane Wohl, the late Lisa Barnett, Leslie Heywood, Maria Maziotti Gillan, and Patrick Vecchio.

Grant’s favorite chair now sits in the corner of his death room at Grant Cottage. (cm)

At Grant Cottage, I am grateful for the patient attention from Executive Director Mary Faith Martini; Site Interpreter Samantha Dow; former Executive Director Jonathan Duda; the President of the Friends of Grant Cottage, Tim Welch; volunteer William Underhill; and most especially living historian/tour guide Steve Trimm. I am grateful, too, to the many volunteers who shared their expertise, stories, and exuberance. Grant’s memory is in wonderful hands.

Frank Scaturro and Ed Hochman with the Grant Memorial Association also made contributions to this project. Ed’s hospitality in New York is always a pleasure. Thanks, too, to the National Park Service at Grant’s Tomb (officially the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial). In an adrenalized city like New York, they ensure that the tomb still offers a distinctive respite.

I appreciate the historians kind enough to contribute appendices to this volume: Edward Alexander, Jim McWilliams, Kathleen Logothetis Thompson, Patrick Tintle, and my own former college history professor, presidential scholar Dr. Richard Frederick. Frank Varney, who contributed the foreword and whose work I greatly admire, wrote a must-read book on Grant’s memoirs that gets at the heart of history vs. memoir: General Grant and the Rewriting of History: How the Destruction of General William S. Rosecrans Influenced Our Understanding of the Civil War. ECW’s Chief historian, Daniel T. Davis, continues to provide research assistance and advice, and my partner in crime, Kristopher D. White, continues to serve as an invaluable sounding board; I am deeply indebted to both of them.

At St. Bonaventure University, I thank my dean, Dr. Pauline Hoffmann, and the departmental assistants, Kathy Boser and Suzzane Ciesla. I thank our team of work-study students, who do a lot of photocopying for me, and I thank my own students for their patience and support. I hope Grant’s story is a reminder to them that writing should be hard work but that it does, indeed, matter.

Although I traditionally save my final thanks for my family, I do have one last note. In the course of writing this book, one of my wife’s friends and colleagues, Gail Brimer, was diagnosed with throat cancer. Not a day went by that her struggle didn’t remind me of what Grant and his family must have been going through. His was not some distant, abstract story; it was immediate, human, and real. I am grateful to Gail for keeping me in touch with that. Her story is still being written, but there’s good hope that it will have a happier ending.

Sculptor John Lopez makes Grant an accessible figure on the streets of Rapid City, South Dakota, as part of the city’s City of the Presidents public sculpture project, all funded through private donors. A limited number of castings of the statue are available, as well (www.johnlopezstudio.com). (jl)

For the Emerging Civil War Series

Theodore P. Savas, publisher

Chris Mackowski, series editor

Daniel T. Davis, chief historian

Sarah Keeney, editorial consultant

Kristopher D. White, emeritus editor and co-founder

Maps by Hal Jespersen

Design and layout by Chris Mackowski

The front porch of Grant Cottage on Mt. McGregor in Wilton, New York, offers a contemplative window into Grant’s last days. (cm)

Foreword

BY FRANK P. VARNEY

Before the dust had even settled, before the smoke of battle had even cleared away, participants in the greatest of American conflicts began trying to shape how the Civil War would be remembered. They met with varying degrees of success, but it is probably safe to say that no one had as much influence on how the history of the war would be remembered as did Ulysses S. Grant.

Those of you who have read my book dealing with Grant’s Memoirs know that I am not certain that this was a positive thing. Grant was not at all shy about castigating his personal enemies, about praising his friends, or even about inventing things that buttressed his particular—and sometimes peculiar—version of history. But we need to consider just why Grant was so successful at shaping history when so many others were not. Why, we must ask, have his memoirs never gone out of print, never stopped influencing historians, when the writing of so many others has receded into the mists of time?

For one thing, Grant’s writing was clear, concise, and to the point: the very model of what historical writing should be, in some ways – if you are willing to overlook his tendency to massage the facts at times. He possessed a grace and clarity of style that make his writing very approachable. There is also the sense of looking over the shoulder of a great man as he struggles to win his battle against mortality just long enough to get his words